Right now, women face a wage gap in every single state. For those of you who don’t know what that means it’s simple: women are paid on average 79 cents on the dollar for doing the same job as a man. And the wage gap isn’t a symptom of women being less educated. Women with doctoral degrees are paid less than men with master’s degrees, and women with master’s degrees are paid less than men with bachelor’s degrees.

But the wage gap doesn’t just exist across gender. The racial wage gap in America has not changed in thirty five years. New data from the Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics cites that black men earned 73% of white men’s hourly earnings in 2015 — the exact percentage they earned in 1980. So how do we fix this?

Well luckily we can turn to the wisdom of a 14-year-old. That’s right, Owen Pallenberg wrote another poem for us. This time the incredible young man is left to wonder why we’re not doing anything about the wage gap in America.

When we asked Owen why he wrote the poem he said, “I decided to write about the issue of the gender and race Wage Gap in our country because it is a very serious problem that has been recently overlooked due to the issues with President Trump, Syria, Health Care, and in honor of Mother’s Day and the first annual 50/50 day.”

Presented in full. We give you “79 Cents” by Owen Pallenberg:

A woman makes on average 79 cents to the man’s buck,

So the woman makes less because of her chromosome’s luck.

This problem in our nation needs to end,

Because yes, a woman makes less…I know it’s hard to comprehend.

Minimum wage in California is $10.50 for a man,

More like $8.92 for a woman, making it hard to create a viable financial plan.

People claim that this gap is just a myth,

But it’s a proven fact that they’re losing out on more than one fifth.

The gap just gets worse for married women, women of color, and even mothers,

Ridiculous, I know. Shouldn’t we all get paid the same as one another?

Why are women blamed for things they can’t control,

Once men and women are equal, we will finally reach our ultimate goal.

Just take a look at the US Women’s National Soccer Team,

They earn about 25% of what the men make, which is really quite extreme,

Even though the women generate more revenue and won the World Cup,

They get paid much less to lace them up.

Black women make 63 cents to the man’s buck,

And Latina women earn only 54 cents, so I guess they’re just out of luck.

Deniers of these stats are obviously citing the alternative facts,

Because it is quite clear that women receive a sales, property, income, and “woman” tax.

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Just when you thought you had your fill of innuendo-heavy, food-related pop songs, Katy Perry’s “Bon Appetit” arrived on the scene to make you feel confused, hungry (in a confused way) and wondering how much she actually knows about the Michelin star system.

On Friday, Perry released a very literal visual interpretation of her single. In her new music video, the pop star is first lifted out of plastic wrap by a team of chefs. They then proceed to rub flour on her very elastic limbs, cover her in carrots and onions, boil her, and do some other stuff. Migos arrives, Perry is laid out on a platter for some very fancy cannibals to consume, and then a pole emerges from the center of the dinner table.

At the end of it all, Perry is left alone, knife and fork in hand, in front of a pie made of human body parts.

We feel … things, but we don’t have the words for them just yet.

Watch the video above. 

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In this crazy-daisy, loop-de-loop, upside-down world in which there’s been a sharp rise in Gwen Stefani impressions, we’d guess, if such a thing could be known, there are still people out there in entertainment media who don’t care whether their work is relevant to the day’s news cycle starring President Donald Trump. 

“Master of None” co-creator Aziz Ansari is one such human being. At the Netflix show’s Season 2 premiere Thursday night, Ansari explained how nothing about the new season changed after the 2016 presidential election ― even though it was written a while before the results came in. The comedian, who stars as Dev on the show, and co-creator Alan Yang discussed the possibility but ultimately decided to leave it be, Variety reported. 

“I personally didn’t ever want to do it. I liked what we wrote and I didn’t want to have him be a part of it,” Ansari said, referring to Trump.

A good fit might’ve been the third episode of the season, titled “Religion,” which addresses Dev’s identity as a Muslim and Indian-American who likes eating pork a lot, among related identity issues. But as Yang noted, “We felt like we didn’t want it to warp the episode, and we liked how it existed so we didn’t specifically address him.”

The first season structured each installment around a theme reflected in the title; other Season 2 episodes include “The Thief,” “First Date,” “New York, I Love You” and “Thanksgiving.” No Trump in those, either.

Ansari is, for the record, publicly and extremely anti-Trump in his political views, having written a heartfelt opinion piece about Trump’s comments on Muslims during the campaign last summer, and having delivered a scorching monologue on “Saturday Night Live” immediately after January’s inauguration ceremony. (“Pretty cool to know he’s probably at home right now watching a brown guy make fun of him, right?”) We can assume the same of Yang, and the show’s writing staff.

But for anyone in need of a news break, “Master of None” is already on Netflix. Catch the trailer below.

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Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan clearly have a funny little girl on their hands. 

During an interview with HuffPost on Build Series Friday, Dewan told a funny story about the first time the couple’s almost 4-year-old daughter, Everly, watched “Step Up.” It was accidental, and it didn’t go over too well. 

As the “World of Dance” host and mentor explains it, the family was vacationing in Mexico when they turned on the TV and “Step Up” came on. 

“It was so funny, we were like, ‘Everly, Everly, look! It’s mommy and daddy!’ At first she didn’t think it was us,” Dewan said. “She’s like, ‘That’s not you guys.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s us, Evie, it’s me!’ And then she goes, ‘Can we watch something good?’ Just like that, and we were humbled. One day she’ll maybe appreciate it on a different level, but yeah, she’s not so into it.”

To be honest, both Channing and Jenna are a little iffy about watching their on-screen performances in the 2006 film, which launched their careers and their relationship. 

“We both cringe because … we’re just so baby new ― our acting, we’re like, ‘What are we doing there?!’ Dewan joked. “It’s so sweet. We were talking about it the other day, like, ‘Do we remember that routine at the end?’ I think when it was the 10-year anniversary we did the lift outside in our yard just to prove that we could still do it!” (They can still do it — watch the video above.) 

As for that other dance movie her dad’s in, Everly will “have a lot of questions” when she finally gets to see it, Dewan says. 

“We got to show [’Magic Mike’] to her before one of her friends at school is like, ‘I saw this movie your dad’s in…’ She’s been at rehearsals so there’s a part of her that probably gets it.”

For more with Jenna Dewan Tatum, watch the full Build Series interview below. 

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The Kardashians aren’t exactly known for their political activism, but we’re living in crazy times. 

Kim, Kourtney and Khloe were spotted holding hands as they walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic in West Los Angeles on Thursday.

Sources told TMZ that the reality stars met with the organization’s leaders and discussed the health care services offered by the nonprofit and how President Trump’s administration is affecting them. 

According to TMZ’s sources, the goal of the Kardashians’ visit, which was taped for their E! series “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” was to find out how the family can raise awareness for Planned Parenthood and how they can contribute in the future. 

No word as to why the Kardashians decided to pick this moment to get involved, but it may have something to do with the fact that earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted to defund Planned Parenthood as part of the GOP’s American Health Care Act. The bill, which still has to go through the Senate before its passed, would prevent Medicaid from reimbursing Planned Parenthood for preventive health services such as birth control, Pap smears and sexually transmitted infection screenings. 

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You’re probably already aware that Cate Blanchett can do anything.

“Anything” now includes playing 13 characters in one movie. 

HuffPost has an exclusive clip from “Manifesto,” a collection of vignettes that channel 20th-century art movements like Dadaism, Surrealism, Pop Art and Dogme 95. Each incorporates famous artistic and political texts, brought to life by Blanchett, who portrays a schoolteacher, a puppeteer, a garbage-incineration employee, a conservative mother, a funeral orator, an avant-garde choreographer, a punk rocker, a stockbroker, a CEO, a homeless man, a scientist, a news anchor and a field reporter. 

The above clip features Blanchett in the news-anchor role, reciting a treatise by the late American artist Elaine Sturtevant. 

“Manifesto,” directed by Julian Rosefeldt, started as an installation at Manhattan’s famous Park Avenue Armory. The movie version is now open in select theaters.

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Depending on how you look at it, Anne of Green Gables is either a heartwarming, funny tale about a spunky girl coming of age, or it’s a dark saga about a child repeatedly submerging her own trauma in order to survive. The former has long been the popular perception of L.M. Montgomery’s beloved book, but the latter lends itself better to prestige drama ― so, naturally, the new Netflix/CBC series “Anne with an E” sets about excavating the tragedy at the heart of Anne, mostly obliterating the joyous comedy of the original tale along the way. 

In truth, the Anne books have always been a delicate blend of both aspects. Anne’s wild imagination and penchant for chattering her way into various scrapes draws attention from her truly tragic childhood and its ongoing reverberations, a current of real pain and darkness that is masked by her tendency toward fictional melodrama.

Orphaned as a baby, Anne Shirley winds up in an asylum, with occasional stints as live-in help in homes. She has never known her parents, and her care has been institutional at best and abusive at worst. When she arrives at Green Gables, at the age of about 11, and discovers that her new guardians ― Marilla Cuthbert and her brother Matthew ― had instead wanted a boy to help around the farm, she performs her disappointment in an unconventionally theatrical way.

The child raised her head quickly, revealing a tear-stained face and trembling lips. “You would cry, too, if you were an orphan and had come to a place you thought was going to be home and found that they didn’t want you because you weren’t a boy. Oh, this is the most tragical thing that ever happened to me!”

Something like a reluctant smile, rather rusty from long disuse, mellowed Marilla’s grim expression.

This is how comfortably tragedy and comedy intermingle in Anne of Green Gables: Crusty old Marilla actually smiles because she is so amused by a child’s accurate description of a traumatizing thing she is experiencing at that very moment. A pint-sized version of the sad clown, Anne puts on a whimsical show to express but also distract from her pain ― a depth and breadth of personal tragedy that she’s far too young to grapple with directly. You could almost believe that she’s actually OK, if you read quickly enough.

Over 100 years after Montgomery began the series, society and children’s fiction have grown far more solicitous of young people, more interested in the darker side of childhood traumas like abuse, parental loss and bullying. Looking back, Anne’s relentless perkiness seems repressed, even callous. So it’s welcome to see an adaptation that not only acknowledges the undeniable melancholy of Anne’s story, but looks directly at it.

What’s uncomfortable is how much the series seems, at times, to revel in it. Her tribulations as an orphan, a girl who has been shuttled between menial live-in roles and an asylum all her life, and a young woman who is painfully aware of the distance between classical beauty norms and her own flawed appearance, constitute insufficient suffering for the protagonist of a serious TV series today.

In the show, her difficult early childhood is revealed vividly, not just in Anne’s anecdotes but through nightmarish flashbacks in which she’s screamed at, whipped, taunted and insulted. It heaps on new trials: The father of a family she worked for dies suddenly while he’s actually in the process of beating her with a strap; other girls at the asylum torture her with dead mice; the sweet middle-class town of Avonlea from Montgomery’s books has transformed into a Stepford-esque country club peopled by sinister Englishmen in light-colored leisure suits and their sneering children. All this suffering is gorgeously, sensuously shot, and her sobbing and panicked breathing lingered upon. 

In the book, while Anne does struggle for acceptance thanks to her unconventional background and more unconventional imagination, her winning personality quickly makes her popular with the other children at school. “I think I’m going to like school here,” she tells Marilla. “There are a lot of nice girls in school and we had scrumptious fun playing at dinnertime.” But a prestige drama’s adolescent heroine today stands little chance of such easy acceptance. In the show, ann older boy barks at her like a dog, while the other girls quickly deem her “trash” and give her the cold shoulder. Anne, played with tremulous vivacity by Amybeth McNulty, can’t simply win inclusion through a combination of human goodness and her own sparkling personality, but scrabble for it through gritty acts of heroism. Her pathway to the popular clique ends up going through ― believe it or not ― a burning building.

“Anne” also distinguishes itself from a classic public television adaptation by amping up the focus on hot-button issues (like the above-mentioned bullying). The creators have transformed Anne into a story for today set 100 years ago, rather than a recreation of a story of and for 100 years ago, with mixed success. The script, which blends actual text from the book with original scenes and lines, reflects the difficulties caused by using a century-old tale to examine issues that we’ve begun to talk about relatively recently. While McNulty, Geraldine James and R.H. Thomson (who portray her guardians Marilla and Matthew) handle their roles with subtlety, much of the cast is not so surefooted. Characters waffle between sometimes stilted delivery of period dialogue and breezily tossing off anachronistic phrases, exchanging offhand greetings of “how’s it going?” and assuring each other, “no worries.” (Sure, that’s how Canadian farmpeople addressed each other in 1908.)

Some embellishments succeed with flair: Its mischievous addition of how Anne might have reacted to her first period ― naturally, she’s convinced that she’s dying a quite tragical death ― adds a funny yet meaningful modern layer to the more buttoned-up Montgomery tale. Menstruation, as the other girls tell Anne in hushed tones at school the next day, simply wasn’t to be spoken of openly at that time. “That’s just the way it is,” says Diana ruefully.

Elsewhere, Anne serves as a projection screen for popular anxieties about children today: Bullying, sexual harassment and exploitation, differing treatment between the genders. Always a bit of a proto-feminist, Anne has sprouted into a full-blown crusader, never missing an opportunity to bring up gender equality. When told that girls keep their menstruation hidden, she retorts, “We can make a whole person, where’s the shame in that?” Besides, she adds, “Do boys have to contend with anything like this?” While true, these sentiments seem retrofitted from another era ― our current one, for example.

With these on-the-nose additions, “Anne” risks telling when showing would be more resonant. Montgomery could be didactic, to be sure, but the ongoing power of Green Gables has been that Anne’s story in itself speaks to generations of girls. Her academic aspirations and disregard for convention allow readers today to see, as McNulty put it in a recent interview, an “accidental feminist” in Anne. Other generations could make the case that she was a wild child carefully reared by good Christians into a domestic goddess ― also, to an extent, true. This nuance and real, human texture provides more scope for conversation than squeezing an old story into a narrow modern mold. 

Overemphasizing Anne’s painful childhood, too, seems counterproductive, not because such things don’t happen but because it serves no purpose. Her original story serves as ample basis for the series’ most interesting angle: Teasing out how vital Anne’s performative conversationalism and outsized imagination are to her psychological survival. Instead, this poignant interplay is frequently drowned out by melodrama. 

A very good adaptation of Anne is buried within the Jane Eyre–esque Gothicism of “Anne with an E.” The cinematography is exquisite, the lead actress is bewitching, and the interplay between Anne’s dark and light sides makes for a fascinating update. But the bonus pain and social issues make the series seem almost cartoonishly HBO-ified, what would result if showrunners fed Anne page by page into a prestige-drama machine that screwed on gratuitous violence and social issues haphazardly.

After all she’s been through, Anne deserves more than that.

“Anne with an E” is now available on Netflix.

You can be highbrow. You can be lowbrow. But can you ever just be brow? Welcome to Middlebrow, a weekly examination of pop culture. Read more here.

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Kelly Richman has been photographing births for three years. In that time, a certain milestone has always stood out to her: the first moment between a baby and mother. 

“As a mom myself, I know these are moments that you can never get back ― these little miracles are only born once,” Richman told HuffPost. “Being able to capture the first breath, the first cry and the first time they were laid on your chest is is unparalleled to anything else in your life.”

In honor of Mother’s Day, the Texas photographer put together a collection of her favorite “first moments” from the 15 births she’s documented. 

“I would like to show people the beauty of motherhood, and I hope it will inspire them to celebrate a special mother in their lives,” said Richman.

Keep scrolling for 13 gorgeous photos of mothers’ first moments with their babies.

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Deize Tigrona at the 2016 Back2Black music festival. CC BY-SA

 

 

Adriana Facina, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

At first sight, there is seemingly nothing feminist about Carioca funk, the electronic dance music coming out of Rio de Janeiro’s poor favelas. Nearly all the songs sung by women are of the sexually explicit, sometimes violent funk putaria variety – hardly empowering.

At least, that’s what I thought when I began my post-doctoral research into the genre in 2008. From my white, middle-class perspective, the salacious lyrics were an expression of machismo, borne of Brazil’s patriarchal society. I understood this type of music, along with the artists’ suggestive performance styles and outfits, as objectification of women that further subjected them to male power.

I couldn’t have been more off base. In truth, by singing frankly about sex and life on the streets in the first person, Rio’s female funk singers are bringing the rough realities of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods to mainstream audiences and emboldening a new generation of young female artists.

Favela funk

I was at my first participant-observation session, attending a favela dance party, when I spotted the samba school rehearsal yard full of sound equipment. A woman’s voice blasted in my ears.

It was the group Gaiola das Popozudas, and the lead singer, Valesca, was wailing to the deep beat of the electronic drum: Come on love/beat on my case with your dick on my face.

I thought: it’s not by chance that this is the first sound I’m hearing on my very first day of fieldwork. There is something I have to learn from these women, certain personal certainties I need to deconstruct.

A product of Brazil’s African diaspora, funk music (which bears little resemblance to the more globally familiar George Clinton variety) began to appear in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s, with original lyrics written in Portuguese. Over the past decade, artists have taken to adapting foreign songs with invented new lyrics, rather than translating the original songs.

With the dawn of songwriting contests at funk parties, young fans became MCs, penning lyrics that talked about the slums where they’d grown up and declared their love for partying and for other pastimes available to poor black youth in Rio de Janeiro.

Back then, there were few women on the stage. When they did perform, female artists, such as the 1990s idol MC Cacau, often sang about love.

An important exception was MC Dandara, a black woman from the streets who saw breakout success with her politicised Rap de Benedita. This old-school rap centred on Benedita da Silva, a black favela resident who was elected to Congress as a Workers’ Party representative, only to be treated with massive prejudice by the mainstream press.

Even Dandara’s stage name was deeply political: Dandara was a warrior woman who was one of the leaders of Brazil’s Quilombo dos Palmares runaway slave settlement, which in the 18th century grew into an abolitionist organisation.

By the turn of the 21st century, male dominance of funk was being challenged as more and more female MCs came onto the scene. The pioneer MC Deize Tigrona, who hailed from one of Rio’s best-known and most dangerous favelas, City of God, was a housemaid when she first made her name singing funk.

Her songs are erotic but jocular. One of Deize’s first hits was Injeção, in which a shot she gets at the doctor’s office becomes a ribald reference to anal sex (the refrain: It stings, but I can take it).

Around the same time in the early 2000s, another City of God resident found fame by singing about sex and pleasure from a woman’s standpoint. Tati Quebra Barraco was black, like Deize, and she challenged prevailing Brazilian beauty standards singing, I’m ugly, but I’m in style/I can pay a motel for a guy.

Funk goes feminist

Affirming fame, money and power, Tati became one of the most successful women in funk. Together, she and Deize ushered in what later became known as feminist funk, influencing a generation of budding female artists in the favelas.

Soon, the artist Valesca Popozuda became the first funk performer to publicly call herself a feminist. Valesca, who is white, picked the stage name Popozuda, which refers to a woman with a big behind (a physical trait much appreciated in Brazil).

Since leaving her band, Gaiola das Popozudas, to launch a solo career, Valesca has become known for explicit lyrics that outline what she likes to do in bed – and not just with men, either.

With songs that evince support for LGBTQ people, among other marginalised communities, her defence of female autonomy is clearly political. In Sou Gay (I’m Gay), Valesca sings, I sweated, I kissed, I enjoyed, I came/I’m bi, I’m free, I’m tri, I’m gay.

 

The video for ‘I’m Gay’ by Valesca Popuzuda.

 

Valesca has become an icon of grassroots feminism for speaking out against prejudice of all stripes. On other tracks, she has spotlighted issues important to working-class and poor women in Rio de Janeiro.

Larguei Meu Marido, for example, tells the tale of a woman who leaves her abusive husband and finds that he suddenly wants her back now that she’s cheating on him (as he used to do to her). Live on stage, when Valesca calls herself a slut, the ladies in the crowd go wild.

Following in the footsteps of these pioneering artists, today many female funk artists sing about an ever-widening variety of topics. The industry still has gender issues, though. Women may have broken through as stage talent, but they are still scarce as funk DJs, entrepreneurs and producers. Men run things behind the scenes.

That will surely change, too. Nothing is impossible for these Brazilian women who, immersed in a deeply patriarchal society ruled by conservative Christian values, found the voice to scream to the world: This pussy is mine!, translating into the language of funk the core feminist slogan: my body, my choice.

Adriana Facina, Anthropology Professor, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Last month, we applauded Reese Witherspoon for helping to rejuvenate the atrophied romantic-comedy genre with “Home Again,” the directorial debut of Nancy Meyers’ daughter. Now, the movie’s first trailer is here, fulfilling every rom-com expectation one can dream of. 

Witherspoon plays a newly divorced mother who invites three aspiring filmmakers (Pico Alexander, Nat Wolff and Jon Rudnitsky) to crash in her guest house. Naturally, a tangled web of romance blossoms, and then her ex-husband (Michael Sheen) re-enters the picture. So many young hot men, what’s a newly 40-year-old woman to do?

“Home Again,” written and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer, opens in September.

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